American Scholar: God And Hip-Hop - Finding The Sacred In The Profane

Professor of Religious Studies Alejandro Nava writes in American Scholar:

I don’t deny that these genres are flawed and ambiguous, and sometimes deserve their reputation as “devil’s music”—as when they promote toxic masculinity, sexism, violence, gross materialism, nihilism, and a culture of drug use. But what may seem predictable and uniform to a distant observer, like a view of the ocean from above, can contain remarkable depth, variety, and idiosyncrasy. From this perspective, I suspect that a listener may come away with what I have known: the genre’s bursting joy and inventiveness, its thrilling beats, its love of rhyme and rhetorical extravagance, its portraits of racial injustice, its longing for freedom and equality, its pining for God.

 Full article here.